Authors: Alvin I Goldman
Publish Date: 2009/03/07
Volume: 144, Issue: 3, Pages: 431-434
Abstract
In the second half of the twentiethcentury the traditional problem of other minds was refocused on special problems with propositional attitudes and how we attribute them to others How do ordinary people with no education in scientific psychology understand and ascribe such complex unobservable states In different terminology how do they go about “interpreting” their peers By charitably presupposing their rationality and assigning them the desires and beliefs that a rational person would have in their circumstances as Dennett and Davidson proposed Many philosophers of mind—perhaps Sellars 1956 was the first—suggested that our grasp of mental states in general and propositional attitudes in particular is based on a folk theory a set of folkpsychological laws that mediate between stimulus inputs mental states and behavioral outputs Mental states are assigned to others and even to oneself by nomological inference from what we know about their observable situation
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